“If you look at the Ohloh statistics again and ignore the 3 people working almost exclusively on Gstreamer [an open-source multimedia framework] and the 2 working on translations, you get 10 Red Hat employees and 5 others. (The 2nd page looks like 6 Red Hat employees versus 8 others with 6 translators/documenters.) This gives the GNOME project essentially a bus factor of 1.”

Bus factor? It’s engineering/developer slang for how many people would need to be hit by a bus before a project would be dead. The lower the number, the more likely it is that the project is too fragile and could easily die. In other words, if Red Hat ever decided that GNOME wasn’t worth investing in, the project would be dead in the water. You can see why Otte thinks this when he also observed that core developers are leaving and that GNOME is understaffed.

In addition, several of the desktop interfaces that have been replacing pure GNOME, such as Ubuntu and Mint’s Cinnamon are based on GNOME. Meanwhile, at the annual GNOME developer meeting, GNOME developers Xan López and Juan José Sánchez still have big dreams for GNOME. They propose releasing GNOME 4.0 in March 2014 and have set a target of 20% market share for the desktop by 2020.

Sorry guys, that’s not going to happen.

While I wouldn’t call the GNOME programmer get-together, as Otte does, a “self-congratulating echo chamber,” I also can’t see GNOME in and of itself becoming important to the Linux desktop again. GNOME is going to stay important, but it’s no longer going to be leading the way on the Linux desktop. GNOME’s day as a leader is done.